On 20 June 2024, the ARIN Advisory Council (AC) accepted “ARIN-prop-331: 
Addition of Definitions for General and Special Purpose IP Addresses” as a 
Draft Policy.

Draft Policy ARIN-2024-7 is below and can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/drafts/2024_7/

You are encouraged to discuss all Draft Policies on PPML. The AC will evaluate 
the discussion to assess the conformance of this draft policy with ARIN's 
Principles of Internet number resource policy as stated in the Policy 
Development Process (PDP). Specifically, these principles are:

* Enabling Fair and Impartial Number Resource Administration
* Technically Sound
* Supported by the Community

The PDP can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/pdp/

Draft Policies and Proposals under discussion can be found at: 
https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/drafts/


Regards,

Eddie Diego
Policy Analyst
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


Draft Policy ARIN-2024-7: Addition of Definitions for General and Special 
Purpose IP Addresses

Problem Statement:

The Number Resource Policy Manual (NRPM) often treats general purpose and 
special purpose IP addresses differently. Unfortunately, we don’t have a 
convenient to use term to describe these categories, so policy often becomes 
either excessively wordy or does not correctly capture the intent. Examples of 
this can be found in section 4.1.8 of the NRPM, and in (currently pending) 
Draft Policies ARIN-2023-8 (where the fact that 4.4 and 4.10 space isn’t 
counted against an organization is repeated numerous times) and ARIN-2022-12 
(where the text does not exclude 4.4 and 4.10 allocations from being counted 
against an organization, but it is the intent that those allocations should be 
ignored). Additionally, temporary allocations under section 11 are rarely 
carved out, even when 4.4 and 4.10 are, even though it is likely the policy’s 
intent that these too should be ignored.

Policy Statement: 

Add the following definitions to Section 2

Special Purpose IPv4 Address - An IPv4 address that the NRPM makes available 
for specific purposes including maintaining critical Internet infrastructure 
(Section 4.4), facilitating IPv6 deployment (Section 4.10), or temporarily for 
experimental purposes as approved by ARIN (Section 11).

General Purpose IPv4 Address - Any IPv4 address issued by ARIN that is not 
issued solely for the purposes stated under Special Purpose IPv4 Addresses.

Special Purpose IPv6 Address - An IPv6 address that the NRPM makes available 
for specific purposes such as maintaining critical Internet infrastructure 
(Section 6.10) or temporarily for experimental purposes as approved by ARIN 
(Section 11).

General Purpose IPv6 Address - Any IPv6 address issued by ARIN that is not 
issued solely for the purposes stated under Special Purpose IPv6 Addresses.

Timetable for Implementation: Immediate.

Comments: I originally intended to give a better definition for the general 
purpose addresses (something along the lines of “An IPvX address indefinitely 
issued by ARIN without special limitations on its use”), but opted for the 
current proposal to make it clear that all addresses in scope for the NRPM are 
either Special Purpose or General Purpose, and that the 2 definitions are 
mutually exclusive.

Note that this proposal only adds definitions and does not change any of the 
existing text; I figured it’d be better to leave any use of the definitions to 
a future policy proposal.






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